Old fashioned OIL skins are excellent at keeping water out. The skin bit is skin, it is breathable.

When I am out in persistant and unrelenting rain, I use an army poncho, perfectly waterproof and not breathable, but it being a poncho, it is massively vented, so no condensation. The good thing about a poncho, is that it can be worn over the self and the backpack and when not doing anything like keeping the rain off, it is a superb groundsheet protector.

The ex- army poncho, my preference being the US type, as it is ripstop, and other ponchos is the provision of eyelets at the corners, which are fab for creating a shelter with a bit of string, a truely useful piece of outdoor equipment, and guess what, very cheap, one can be had for less than twenty quid new, a repro product lacking the NSN, but the same and not pre owned. It fold s down into a four by four inch flat stuff sack, and for the purpose of this writing, I have just weighed it and it weighs 300 grammes.

 Sometimes I feel comfort can be had purely by a bit of thinking instead of large sums of money, nothing will be perfect, what we should seek is a compromise.

> actually seems best suited to some kind of service which waterproofed existing stuff that you sent them

That thought crossed my mind reading a similar thread on UKC last night.  One of the reports showed a box with boots in, and, at first, I thought it was the IonMask applicator doofer.  Until I realised that it was merely a 'waterproof demonstrator' box...

I'd question the '100% waterproof' claims made for fabrics so treated; if there's no continuous layer to impede water ingress, it won't have any sort of hydrostatic head, certainly not the 1500mm required to meet BS requirements for 'waterproof clothing'.

Think of it more as a very good DWR.  Hopefully one that really remains D, unlike most of the exisiting DWR treatments.

Well, the big question is: do we really understand what ion mask means and how it works. In essence it's not really that different from gore-tex you know. Gore-tex doesn't let in water because its pores are so small but because it repells it. That is what hydrophobic means after all: the surface energy of the gore-tex mebrane is so low that watermolecules which gets in contact with the gore-tex membrane attach easier to other watermolecules than to the membrane. The hydrostatic head  is determined in large by this. It has less to do with the pores than is in quoted in all the marketing stuff. The fact that ion mask has no continuous layer is kind of relative. Gore-tex has an hydrostatic head of 28 meters, 45 meters, 80 meters or whatever number is quoted. But if you look through a microscope, it's hard to see gore-tex as a continuous layer. The gore-tex membrane (for a second not taking the PU-layer into account) can consist of as much as 95% air. That's what all the pores are about. It's the same with eVENT.

The molecules used in the ion mask process repell water 2 or 3 times as hard as the gore-tex membrane does. This is nothing new. In fact, those molecules are very similar tot the molecules used to coat the inner of the eVENT mebrane to make it oleophobic. What is often forgot is that the coating in the eVENT membrane not only makes it oleophobic but also more hydrophobic than it already is. Those molecules are called fluorocarbons. It's just pure chemistry. You could see ion mask a bit as the eVENT membrane in which the membrane itself has been removed while the oleophobic coating has stayed behind.

The question I have is how durable it will be. The plasma makes it possible to go deep in the microscopic structure of a material where the fluorocarbon molecules is bonded on a microscopic/nanoscopic level. Current ways to apply DWR's allow only bonding to the surface. Compare it a bit with an onion which has been treated. Normal DWR's coat only the outside so if you peel off the outer layer, the treatment is gone. The plasma treatment is supposed to treat not only the outer layer but also all the other layers so if you peel off one layer, the other layers are still functional. Well, that is how they say it is suppsed to work. There is supposed to be a film of a boot that first gets the treatment and then is scuffed with a knife. It shows that even then repellency of the material remains.

The biggest question for me is how strond the bonding is. Id the bonding is indeed as strond as they say, we can really have a water repellent which earns the additon "durable".

 What the after treatment part concerns, I've understood that the investment  alone could easily require something with 6 or 7 zero's. Not something you do every day.

In a way yes.

One big difference is that it's applied to the finished product - and to every part of it like zips etc - rather than built into the fabric manufacturing process itself.  Lets them treat tissue paper and the like....

(I wonder how they avoid turning the tissue paper into a cinder? Plasma isn't normally the coldest thing ever!). 

They make quite a big thing of how much more enviromentally friendly doing it this way is.

This is also why it would work nicely as a service applied to existing goods. Sadly given that initial investment cost we're not going to see that  

If it's going to be tied to a few manufacturers then it will probably be rather dependent on how good their stuff otherwise is. After all it does take quite a lot to wet out current windshirts and the like.

(I wonder how they avoid turning the tissue paper into a cinder? Plasma isn't normally the coldest thing ever!).

By doing it in an oxygen free environment. Laser cutting machines often come with a nozzle to squirt nitrogen or argon or some such non reactive gas at the cutting site to stop the material from burning. 

 Though as half the point of tissue paper is that it does absorb water, this may not be a very useful application of the technology!

> What is often forgot is that the coating in the eVENT membrane not only makes it oleophobic but also more hydrophobic than it already is. Those molecules are called fluorocarbons.

Are they?  I thought Event used a PE coating (yes, I meant PE).

The big difference to me is that a fabric has socking great big holes between the warp and weft.  And I really can't see surface energies bridging those gaps with sufficient force to generate a decent hydrostatic head.

As for things being 'solid' or 'full or air', I'll remind you that an atom is mostly empty space...   The fact that they make solid matter feel solid is down to energies of a different nature and vastly greater magnitude than surface energies...

> Well, the big question is: do we really understand what ion mask means and how it works

No...

The big difference to me is that a fabric has socking great big holes between the warp and weft.  And I really can't see surface energies bridging those gaps with sufficient force to generate a decent hydrostatic head.

Me neither. Tho the thought has occurred to me that 2 layers of Ventile are supposed to be effectively waterproof.  So maybe a 2 layer material treated this way could do it, the holes in the weave of the upper layer latting in some water, which then gets shoved back out again by the threads in the layer below. 

captain paranoia wrote (see)

> What is often forgot is that the coating in the eVENT membrane not only makes it oleophobic but also more hydrophobic than it already is. Those molecules are called fluorocarbons.

Are they?  I thought Event used a PE coating (yes, I meant PE).

Okay, fair enough; I was only going on what was reported early in Event's life.

Which is it, though?  Urethane or acrylic?  Have BHA/GE said what they use?

My main point still stands; that surface energy (electrostatic) effects are very short range, so I'd be doubtful whether they will be able to bridge interstitial gaps to provide sufficient force to prevent water ingress under pressure.  In an ePTFE membrane, even one that is 95% air, the holes are much smaller, so the surface energy effect is able to provide sufficient force to prevent water ingress.

captain paranoia wrote (see)

Okay, fair enough; I was only going on what was reported early in Event's life.

Which is it, though?  Urethane or acrylic?  Have BHA/GE said what they use?

My main point still stands; that surface energy (electrostatic) effects are very short range, so I'd be doubtful whether they will be able to bridge interstitial gaps to provide sufficient force to prevent water ingress under pressure.  In an ePTFE membrane, even one that is 95% air, the holes are much smaller, so the surface energy effect is able to provide sufficient force to prevent water ingress.

I must admit, you're probably right about the surface tension issue.

What the eVENT coating concerns, I actually don't know which of the two it is. I have references to both. It could be that the change in production method also involves a change in coating composition to  be compatible with the new process. The acrylic components was mentioned first when eVENT was still being made by the use of VOC's. The urethane components seem to be used in the new process.